The GNOME team has released GNOME 2.17.5. "This is our fifth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. This is also the release which marks the start of the API/ABI freeze for the platform and the start of the feature freeze."

khtml predates gecko and continues to provide us with features and use possibilities gecko simply can't.

like what?

Like its light weight, small fingerprint? Like its quite small codebase for maintaining? Like its code's cleanliness for developers? It also makes developers easy to embedded it to their own apps. Take a look at Akregator and KTorrent for example.